No one accomplishes anything of value without a vision. Like Yogi Berra said, If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else. We need to be able to see where we want to end up and then back up to where we are and set reasonable goals to achieve our desired end. I contend that everyone is operating on the basis of some vision. You are headed somewhere.
As a church we have a vision to disciple the nations, baptizing them and teaching them to obey all that Christ commands. Accomplishing that end colors everything about us.
Micah lays out as complete an outline of God’s redemptive goal for the world as any prophet in the OT. God is moving history to his desired end. We should know that and receive it as the North Star of our lives, orienting our lives to God’s redemptive purpose.
Micah introduces his book to us as the word of YHWH (1). Micah is made up of series of oracles that each in its own right is the word of the LORD and taken together constitute the word of the LORD. The covenant LORD of Israel has a word for his people, represented by Samaria and Jerusalem (1). The word of the LORD is a word that Micah saw in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah kings of Judah. Those were days of covenant breaking unfaithfulness among the people of God. The word that Micah saw is a word of judgment and salvation. God will judge Israel to purify a remnant whom in his amazing grace he will redeem in order to accomplish his saving purpose among the nations.
The message of Micah is that there is no one like YHWH in judgment and salvation. Judgment is presented in Micah as a means to God’s redemptive purpose. He accomplishes salvation through judgment.
This is seen in a number of ways. I will point out two. First, Micah bookends this book with his name (1:1; 7:18). His name means, Who is like YHWH? In Micah, names have meaning. His is a rhetorical question, an exclamation of praise and wonder at the incomparable God of Israel. He identifies himself in verse 1 and wastes no time in presenting the majestic LORD of heaven descending from his heavenly temple in judgment with the high places of the earth melting under his feet (1:3-4). Who is like YHWH? No one is like him in judgment.
Then at the end of the book (7:18), playing off his name, Micah asks the question, Who is like YHWH? Again he gives a vision of the incomparable LORD of Israel but this time showing his unparalleled mercy. He describes him as the God who pardons iniquity, passes over transgression, does not retain anger, delights in steadfast love, is full of compassion, defeats our iniquity, casts all our sin in the depths of the sea, and keeps his covenant with his people (7:18-20; cf. Ex. 34:6-7). Who is like YHWH? No one is like him in salvation.
Second, Micah has arranged his book into three sections each of which begins with judgment and ends in salvation (1-2; 3-5; 6-7). Stephen Dempster likens the three sections of the Micah to movements in a symphony that increase in intensity as we progress from one section to the other.1 Today, We will look at the first movement in Micah’s composition.
In this first section of his book YHWH calls the nations to witness him move out in judgment against his people sending them in exile. There he will show himself mighty to save a remnant in order to fulfill his redemptive plan for the ages.
Micah’s first oracle is to call the nations to witness the Sovereign LORD judging his people. Such an appearance is called a theophany, an appearing of God. The description of the LORD’s appearing is majestic: he comes out of his place, comes down to tread on the high places of the earth, the mountains melt, and the valleys split open (3-4).
Is the LORD here judging the nations (2-4) or his people (5)? The answer is both. He is the judge of all the earth. The nations need to know that the heavenly LORD takes notice of their sin. When you read the text, the sense of it is God is witness against2 the nations but judgment falls on Israel and Judah (5). The point is the nations must learn from God’s judgment of his people that he is their judge too. The covenant LORD has a case to make against his people, and it has to do with his purpose for the nations as well.3
God chose Israel to call out a people for himself from among rebels. In the New Covenant, he restored his people opening the way for the nations to flow into the KOG.
God judges his people for the sake of the nations. Salvation comes through judgment. This is not to minimize judgment and make it into some pleasantry. Judgment is damning. Judgment removes the unbelieving and godless and opens the way for gospel proclamation.
The ultimate example of salvation coming through judgment is God’s judgment falling on his Son, so that those who repent and believe are saved from the wrath to come. But those who will not believe in the Son are storing up wrath for the day of wrath.
We might be tempted to downplay judgment because God works salvation through it, but the severity of judgment cannot be overstated. The nations are called to witness as the Sovereign LORD marches through the NK destroying Samaria and then through the cities of southwestern Judah to the gate of Jerusalem.
Micah first takes up the judgment of Samaria (6-7). Both Samaria and Jerusalem are charged with high-handed sins in violation of the covenant, particularly idolatry (5). The SK was founded on a platform of idolatry. When the kingdom divided, Jeroboam, fearing the kingdom would reunite under the Davidic king if those in the North traveled to Jerusalem to worship, placed golden calves as Bethel and Dan and said, You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt (1Kgs. 12:28; cf. Ex. 32). That is where it started, and it continued for the next 200 years, until Micah announced their demise. God raised Assyria up to bring judgment on the NK. In 722, after years of Assyrian control, Assyria destroyed the NK and took Samaria. You can see in verse 7 the judgment fit the crime. The repetition of all in verse 7 shows the completeness, irony, and finality of the judgment.
Second, Micah takes up the judgment of Judah (8-16). This speech begins with the lament of the prophet (8-9) and ends with the lament of Judah (16). The vision that Micah saw of the Sovereign LORD moving through Samaria and through the southwestern towns of the Judah to the gate of Jerusalem caused him to respond wildly (8). His message of the judgment of Judah caused him to lament and wail, go stripped and naked, and howl like jackals and ostriches in grief (8). In our culture, if you see someone act like that you go the other way. So much for the current craze to be a prophetic voice! The judgment he saw was more than he could bear. The wound was incurable, and it had come to Judah, to the very gate of Jerusalem (9).
In 701 BC, Assyria arrived at the gate of Jerusalem. When Ahaz was king, he formed an alliance with Assyria to defend himself against the NK and Syria, defying the preaching of Isaiah (Isa. 7; 2Kgs 16:5-9). He moved the altar of burnt offering from its central location off to the side and made a replica of an Assyrian altar and put it in its place (2Kgs 16:10-18). He built high places in every town in Judah and street corner in Jerusalem (2Chron. 28:24-25). He adopted the Canaanite practice of child sacrifice (Mic. 1:5; 5:7; cf. 2Kgs. 16:2-4).
When Hezekiah became king in 715, he continued many of the practices of his father, Ahaz, until 701 when a massive Assyrian army that had just destroyed much of Judah parked outside the gate of Jerusalem (1:8-16; cf. 2Kgs. 20; Isa. 30:1-5; 31:1-3). This is the situation Micah saw and he mourned.
Micah does not mention Assyria but present YHWH marching through the land in judgment on his people. The point is whether God uses nature, armies, or angles, it is still the judgment of God.
In verses 10-15, Micah describes Assyria’s march through 9 cities of southwestern Judah to the gate of Jerusalem. Hebrew scholars point out that this text is choppy and at several places lacks agreement is gender and number.4 This is reflective of this being a wild lament of uncontrolled grief and shock. He is overwhelmed by the vision that he has seen and stammers in communicating it. The design is to help the reader feel the severity of the judgment.
Yet, this passage is masterpiece in design and wordplays. It is bookended by scenes from the life of David. Tell it not in Gath5 (10) is a direct quote from David’s lament at the news of the death of Saul and Jonathan (cf. 2 Samuel 1:20). In verse 15b, the glory of Israel shall come to Adullam recalls David, God’s anointed king, fleeing from Saul (cf. 1Sam 22). The very center of the text focuses on Jerusalem (12b). The message is unmistakable. The SK will be overthrown. The king will flee for his life as the people go into exile (16b).
As Micah moves through the cities of southwestern Judah, he plays off of place names in terms of their meaning or sound to describe the devastation of the judgment of God. This was an especially powerful means of communication in ancient Israelite culture because names had meaning. They denoted destiny. So Micah says to Beth-le-aphrah, “house of dust,” you will roll in dust (10b); Shaphir, “beautiful,” you will be stripped of your beauty (11a); Zaanan, “exit point,” there is no exit for you (11b); Beth-ezel, “house of taking away,” you will be taken away (11c); Maroth, “bitter,” there is nothing good or sweet for you (12a). Jerusalem, “City of Peace,” you are a disaster because the LORD came down (12b cf. 1:3); Lachish, sounds like “horse,” you will harness steeds6 to chariots to escape not fight (13a); Moresheth-gath, “parting gifts,” you are given parting gifts to emphasize being taken away (14a); Achzib, “to be deceitful” or “disappointing,” you will be disappointing to the kings of Israel (14b); Mareshah, “conqueror,” you will be conquered (15a).
Micah uses all the powers of language to emphasize the severity of judgment. He concludes by calling Jerusalem to mourn for the exile of its people (16).
There is cause for lament today, but lament needs to be about real sin with real consequences. It design is not to make us feel better about ourselves. We have people today lamenting their color, their oppression of others, their privilege, their racism in order to get a free-pass on being a good person. We virtue signal while the blood of babies runs through the streets sacrificed on the altar of women’s health and sexual freedom. We could go on with the sins of our society. Perhaps Micah would say, America has become the land of the bound and the home of the perverse. I lament today’s lamenting. We need to lament because people are going to hell and Christians are too busy virtue lamenting to preach the gospel to them. We don’t understand the severity of judgment.
In these verses Micah outlines the reasons for judgment (2:1-5). He defends the rightness of God’s judgment based on the covenant. In doing so he takes on those who object to his message of judgment. In chapter 1, the prophet announced judgment but only tips his hat to idolatry (1:5) as the cause. Here he shows how Israel’s breaking of the first command led to injustice toward their neighbors.
If you mold god into your own image, you can easily justify sin, all kinds of sin. Perhaps, this is how things that used to be sinful are suddenly virtuous, and sin is to deny virtue of such actions. What is sinful did not change. People simply re-invented God. The god of this age maintains the virtue of abortion, the virtue of same-sex desire, the rights of 8 year olds to be transgender, disregard for authority, and the wanton destruction of private property.
Micah opens with a woe oracle that gives the reasons for judgment (2:1-2) and God’s response (2:3-5). Woe is a word used at funerals to express grief, so he begins by announcing their death (2:1) and ends with their excommunication from the people of God (2:5). In their covetousness, they plotted how they might seize a person’s house. One’s house was everything—his land, his family, his inheritance. The land was the LORD’s gift to his people. It anticipated God giving his people the world. They did this simply because it was within their power (2).
What they did not realize is that while they were planning to disinherit their neighbor, the LORD was planning their demise (2:1, 3). In poetic justice, they would, perhaps, voice the same complaint that they heard from the people they disinherited (2:4). No one, however can disinherit you like God can. It is a sobering thought for any who would devise wickedness and work evil that the God of heaven has planned your demise.
Such preaching from the prophet drew complaints (6-11). The prosperity prophets took issue with Micah’s preaching.7 Micah quotes his opponents in verses 6-7a: Do not preach. One should not preach of such things; disgrace will not overtake us. Should this be said, O house of Jacob? Has the LORD grown impatient? Are these his deeds?
The word they use for preach (nataph) means to drip. It’s like they are saying, your preaching is annoying. They asked three rhetorical questions that expect the answer, No. The prosperity prophets preached that God would never allow Israel to be defeated, Jerusalem to be conquered, and the temple be destroyed. Their proof text was Exodus 34:6-7, where the LORD proclaimed his Name to Moses and revealed himself to be merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. They reasoned God will not act outside his character. The problem is they left off the last part of that Israelite creed, But who will by no means clear the guilty (cf. 7:18-20).
Micah in effect says, Look out the window. The cities of Judah are gone and 185,000 Assyrians are camped outside the wall.8 He asked his own rhetorical question, Do not my words do good to him who walks uprightly? The answer implied is Yes. If they would turn from their wickedness, the preaching of the truth would do them good. They, however, rejected the truth.
For their covenant violations they would be exiled (2:1-2,8-9). The land would not be rest for them. They had polluted it (10). The land could not bear them; it would vomit them out (Lev. 18:28; 20:22). If Micah had told them what they wanted to hear, he would have been their favorite preacher (11).
The prophets were preachers of the covenant. As such, they made a theological case for judgment and exile and the implications of that for Israel and the world. Micah came preaching the curses of the covenant showing that foreign invaders and exile were the outworking of covenantal curses (cf. Lev 26; Deut. 28:15-68). While the prosperity preachers reasoned Jerusalem will never fall, Micah is in effect saying, Because God is upholding his end of the covenant, He will judge you.
Micah moved from his message of judgment to a message of salvation in this final word in this section (2:12-13). Judgment does not get the final word. One of the key differences between his message of judgment and the one proclaiming salvation is the lack of a stated reason for salvation.9 There is a reason for judgment—their high-handed sin. So the question is not, Why does God judge? The question is, Why would he save? Salvation is grounded in God’s mercy.
Micah began this section with a theophany of God in judgment, calling on the nations to witness his judgment of his people (1:2-3). If he would not spare his people, what hope did they have? Micah closes this section with another theophany of God’s gracious saving purpose in the exile. If God chose Israel to save the world, he exiled them to save the world.
Micah has prophesied of exile (1:16; 2:5, 10). Could God possibly have a purpose of grace in the exile? You could look at exile as being carried away out of the land. But there is another way to view it. The LORD was graciously at work in exile assembling a remnant. He would preserve the faithful in exile. He would be like a shepherd gathering his flock (12).
Not only is he the Good Shepherd, he is the Breaker who will lead them out of exile (13). This term first appears in the strangest chapter in the Bible, Genesis 38 (Gen. 38:29; cf. 2 Sam. 5:20; Isa. 28:21). When Tamar was delivering twins, one put out his hand and the mid-wife tied a scarlet thread on it. Then he drew his hand back. The son born first did not have the scarlet thread, so he was named Perez, breach in the sense of breaking forth.
Perez, the breaker, is in the line of Christ. In this text (13), the breaker is the king, the LORD who will break through the walls holding his people and bring them out of exile. We are going to see this theme of exile and restoration developed further in Micah. The remnant called out of exile is a summons to the nations to gather into the people of God.
This is only and ultimately fulfilled in Christ. He is the Shepherd par excellence who gathers his sheep in exile. He is the Breaker par excellence who breaks open the world of death in his resurrection from the dead. That has become the call to the nations to gather into the people of God. The church now takes up the mission of Jesus in the world to break the gates of hell and set the captives free through the gospel of the Son of God.